Abstract :
We give a synthetic treatment of the first Bianchi identity both in the style of differential forms and in the style of tensor fields on the lines of Lavendhomme (Basic Concepts of Synthetic Differential Geometry, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1996). The tensor-field version of the identity is derived from the corresponding one for microcubes, just as we did for the Jacobi identity of vector fields with respect to Lie brackets in our previous paper (J. Theoret. Phys. 36 (1997) 1099–1131). As a by-product we have found out an identity of microcubes corresponding to the classical identityR(X,Y,Z)=backward differenceXbackward differenceYZ−backward differenceYbackward differenceXZ−backward difference[X,Y]Zof tensor fields, which has largely simplified Lavendhommeʹs lengthy proof (Basic Concepts of Synthetic Differential Geometry, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1996, Section 5.3, Proposition 8, pp. 176–180).